The Top 50 Albums of 2012

When we included the Men's Leave Home on last year’s Top Albums list, there was hope that the band's pulverizing Sacred Bones debut could trigger a revival of truly nasty, abrasive indie rock in the increasingly friendly confines of Brooklyn. In the next six months, they toned down the sonic S&M on the relatively accessible and triumphant Open Your Heart only to shelve the vast majority of it in a live setting. Instead, they test drove material from their next album-- and from the sounds of things, it will possibly head into full-blown Allmans and Creedence territory. The lesson being: It’s risky to use their studio albums to say anything definitive about the Men at this point, so let’s just forget about narratives and evolution and appreciate Open Your Heart as a record that makes them sound capable of doing whatever the hell they want. It cycles through barnstorming classic rawk, searing punk, beer-chugging country, and muscular krautrock. If you basically like any kind of music made with guitars, there’s something for you here. --Ian Cohen

Chan Marshall got stuck in Los Angeles with the Endtimes Capitalism blues and from it wrenched Sun. Confident and cool, it was Marshall born again, transformed by her struggles and transfixed by America’s. She tried her hand, at what, in her dark palette, counts as party music, quasi-rapping (“3 6 9”), going sublime about patriotism and New York as it will never be again (“Manhattan”), and doling out love and liberation to little troubled girls. While the album, largely a solo endeavor, was about Marshall coming into her own power as an artist, it was one of the very few in recent years that reflected the current climate of America back to us, without sloganeering; Sun is Chan, of the people. --Jessica Hopper

Considering how much music he'd released in various configurations over the past two years, it was easy to forget that Total Loss was actually the proper debut full-length from Tom Krell's experimental R&B project. After Love Remains, which gathered highlights from a series of free downloadable EPs, it was hard to know where he would take his sound next, whether access to better studios and more eyes watching would push HTDW somewhere that didn't play to Krell's strengths. But Total Loss turned out to be the right next step. Krell knows that people turn to his music to feel something, that it's less about the details than the totality of the expression. And this album succeeds by amplifying emotion to the greatest possible degree. At points, like on highlight "Set It Right", the music draws from the ego-obliterating power of shoegaze, but the record also brings to mind the soaring drama of Broadway, going for the biggest and most powerful moments at every turn. Turns out Krell never needed to be lo-fi, and here his internally focused music is projected outward to glorious effect, a deep outpouring from a generous heart. --Mark Richardson

Spanish producer John Talabot moves at his own pace, veering from meditative house grooves to music that encroaches on the pop sphere. His transitions between these worlds are seamless, whether he’s working with guest vocalists or producing slow-reveal instrumental pieces like this album’s gorgeously understated “Oro y Sangre”. The space Talabot works in is often tricky to get right-- dreamy dance music that can work just as well in a club as it can on headphones at home. For much of this record it feels like he’s searching for the perfect sunrise anthem, the kind of record a DJ slips on as dark fades into light and flagging spirits are given a much-needed lift to close out the night. Talabot clocks in for his shift around the same time as Burial, only with entirely different results. For Burial, the early morning hours are all long walks through litter-strewn streets, lost in a cycle of bitter rumination. ƒIN pictures that same time as the point to indulge in a comforting kind of reverie, a quiet moment to get lost in for a few minutes, a place where normal existence can gently fade back into the frame. --Nick Neyland

After a series of CD-Rs and cassettes released in tiny editions, Los Angeles-based composer/songwriter Julia Holter raised her profile with 2011's Tragedy and broke through with this year's Ekstasis. Her latest full-length straddled the worlds of high art and pop, moving easily between the ancient and modern. Classic 1980s touchstones like synths, vocoder, and drum machines are her primary building blocks, but Holter also deploys shimmering harpsichord tones and harmonium drones. Singing about statues, a weeping boy in the moon, and people unable to connect regardless of their epoch, Holter's vocals recall 70s singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill one moment and Renaissance-period madrigals the next. By moving into accessibility while keeping her unique aesthetic intact, Holter crafted a truly ecstatic art-pop album. --Andy Beta

Schoolboy Q's debut wasn't the the headiest or most sonically expansive album to emerge from L.A.'s Black Hippy collective (that distinction belongs to Ab-Soul's Control System); nor was it the smartest or most commercially successful (that'd be Kendrick's opus good kid, m.A.A.d. city). But it was easily the best party record of the bunch, thanks to call-and-response ragers like "There He Go", spirited trunk rattlers like "2 Raw", and the delirious, A$AP Rocky-assisted lead single "Hands on the Wheel". Woozy-but-assertive production by Mike Will Made It and Digi+Phonics serve as a musical reflection of Q's mission statement: "Am I over faded?/ Hell yeah, it's true/ Turn on a beat, ain't no limit to what I can do." Also, it should certainly be noted that Q almost single-handedly brought back the bucket hat. There he go, indeed. --Corban Goble

“U guys don’t know how many times I’ve listened to Lofticries on repeat,” Danny Brown wrote on Twitter this fall before giddily rapping over a new version of Purity Ring’s “Belispeak”. Meanwhile, members of the sometimes-zonked Weeknd crew as well as upstart Atlanta rapper (and noted molly advocate) Trinidad Jame$ have also sung the Canadian electro-pop duo's praises. In a way, it should come as no surprise that Purity Ring-- who’ve cited narcotics trendhopper Soulja Boy as a central influence-- have found fans and collaborators among some of music’s loudest MDMA enthusiasts. It is undeniable: the futuristic pop melodies and confectionary vocals found on Shrines slice so cleanly and quickly at the music-listening pleasure receptors that you might believe your serotonin levels have temporarily been thrown out of whack. The effect is compounded by producer Corin Roddick’s love of down-pitched, narcotic layers and vocalist Megan James’ science-fiction narratives, which draw you into a haunted forest where every surface is a glistening piece of crystal. James adds a physicality to the sugary experience with corporeally-obsessed lyrics-- weakened legs, holes drilled into eyelids, sweating lips, starving hips, seeping blood, ripped sternums-- reminding you that the comedown is always just around the corner. --Carrie Battan

Miguel has been posited as a rule-breaking R&B wunderkind but Kaleidoscope Dream is more about how he works within the rules he sets for himself. He offers a sensuous, yearning “Sexual Healing” tribute (“Adorn”), tearful S&M in a multi-layered rainstorm (“Use Me”), and dream-like harmonies and Timbaland-style rhythmic stutters (“Do You...”)-- a succession of costumes that are comfortingly familiar but beautifully designed. The album succeeds in large part due to his excellent and versatile voice, which effortlessly navigates a variety of contradictory poses in both falsetto and baritone, moving from the whispery intimacy of the title track (“body language like piano keys” he murmurs so close you can almost feel his breath in your ear) to the glamorous distance of “Arch & Point”. Sometimes it makes sense to cut through the artifice, but Miguel creates it and then lives up to it. --Tim Finney

Steven Ellison is Flying Lotus, but Flying Lotus isn’t just Steven Ellison. When the name Flying Lotus is attached to a project, it means you’re getting Ellison’s acuity, imagination, and daring, not to mention his prodigious record collection and encyclopedic musical knowledge. But it also means that you’re almost guaranteed to get some Thundercat, you might be getting a Thom Yorke or an Erykah Badu, and you’re definitely getting some talented session musicians whose names you don't know. Until the Quiet Comes, Ellison’s dreamiest effort to date, is also his most openly collaborative. And it's the producer's ability to guide his talented players and channel his fertile imagination through them that gives the record its sense of cohesion, even as it travels from the assembly-line jitterbug of “Putty Boy Strut” to the languid beauty of the Laura Darlington-powered “Phantasm”. All told, Until the Quiet Comes was the waking-dream antidote to Cosmogramma’s delightful excess. --Jonah Bromwich

Ariel Pink was strictly a cult artist until “Round and Round” brought more people into the tent. The early word pegged Mature Themes as his “freak out the squares” record, i.e., the most predictable response to sudden fame a notoriously unstable guy could have. If you didn’t have the stomach for “Pink Slime”, the patience to endure the seven-minute drone of “Nostradamus & Me”, or the belief that the the cover of Donnie and Joe Emerson’s “Baby" was sincere, there were plenty of opportunities to hit the exits. But Mature Themes has a wealth of ingeniously crafted pop songs, songs that were weirder, funnier, and more strangely affecting than just about anything else that came out this year. So while Mature Themes is something of an “old Ariel Pink album” intended for his new fans, it’s by no means an act of antagonism. Instead, it's a show of confidence and trust that he didn’t need to remake “Round and Round” to dazzle them all again. Pretty mature shit for an album with a song called “Schnitzel Boogie” on it. --Ian Cohen